revenge

this one a long time have i watched. all his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. never his mind on where! he! was! hmm? what! he! was doing!
- yoda

..i have only to wear black socks to be stigmatised as the demon overlord
- andrew eldritch

i checked my horoscope with a kind of foreboding today. i had this feeling it was going to say 'you can run but you can't hide, motherfucker! today's the day the shit's gonna hit the motherfucking fan'. well, that'd be the gist, anyways. horoscopes don't talk like that, after all. maybe this instead:

pisces
the moon in your sign today exerts a powerful force toward resolution. if there's something you've been avoiding facing, the time may have come to pay the piper, you evil snake-owning motherfucker.

it didn't say that though. it said 'instead of using your imagination as an escape, create an inner landscape that matches your goals. these intentions can then pave the road for your journey.'

i stared at it. it seemed like pretty good advice. and apart from that i was pleased and gladdened and humbled that my horoscope had not taken the chance to kick me when i was expecting to be kicked. instead it offered an olive branch of peace and reconciliation and i was pleased and gladdened etc.

i am not entirely sure why i have this feeling of foreboding. well, actually, i have one or two ideas. here's one of them:

i took accidental revenge on the puppy for pissing and shitting everywhere by accidentally abandoning him. it happened like this: i'd finished mopping up all the piss and shit and was going to the post office to pay bills and rent. the puppy darted between my legs as i set my feet on the ground and lifted them again, one after the other: walking. seemed like he needed a walk. he had the vitamin b at the moment: i was moving slowly, partly cos i was tired from cleaning up piss and shit and partly so i wouldn't kick him by accident.

i got his lead and put it on him and we walked to the post office, him darting this way and that, me lifting one foot at a time off the ground and replacing it a little way down the road.

the post office is on a busy busy road and there was nowhere to tie him up nearby that wouldn't have let him run on to the road and he's too little to know why this is a bad idea. so i tied him up around the corner out the front of the sisters of mercy. which sisters of mercy? i'll tell you later. oh hi, steve. what's up? i'm a little busy-

STEVE: i'm enjoying the stories but there is one literary device you're using a lot which i'm getting sick of. can i tell you which one?

ME: (aside) god, i use so many potentially-annoying literary devices..

1) saying 'i said that already' all the time.
2) saying something untrue and then saying 'i didn't really. i just made that bit up', which i stole from bill bryson.
3) mixing teenage language like 'hafta' and 'probly' and 'lil' with unnecessary erudtion, which i stole from fafblog, along with the very long sentences that go all over the shop.
4) writing stories that are almost entirely digression, which i stole from.. can't remember. but cryptonomicon by neal stephenson uses it very entertainingly.
5) writing about everything: herman melville, salman rushdie, tom robbins.
6) very short sentences. thanks don delillo! chapters the length of other people's paragraphs. thanks richard brautigan!
7) hyperlinks all over the place: bloggers in general, but especially boingboing.
8) explaining the obvious: douglas adams and fafblog again. and maybe neal stephenson too.
9) gratuitous swearing mixed with erudition: get your war on and deadwood.
10) writing in lower case all the time. no-one to blame for that but myself.
11) treating the group email as a storytelling form. ditto.
12) long lists. blame annie proulx in the shipping news and accordion crimes .
13) using the flimsiest of delaying tactics to create suspense.
14) treating a group email as a tiny novel with chapters and quotes etc.
15) over-use of quotes: i was doing this already but meeting the quote generator certainly encouraged me to do it a lot more.

(to STEVE) sure, go ahead!

STEVE: the one where you blame the reader for YOUR digressions.

ME: (aside) oops, forgot one:

16) blaming the reader for one's OWN digression.. fafblog again. you guys should really read fafblog if you like this kind of thing. guy's a genius.

(to STEVE) aaaaah i don't think i'll be giving that up any time soon, sorry.

STEVE: but..

ME: anyway, quit interrupting, steve! i'm trying to tell a story!

i walked into the post office. everything was different. everything that used to be there was gone except the scales and they were somewhere else now. the room was a different shape too. there was also a TAB counter in the corner and this threw me most of all. it seemed wrong somehow that there should be a TAB counter in the post office. i felt like the separation of church and state had been violated.

the guy with a hook for a hand wasn't there either. there was only the quiet guy with a beard who used to stand quietly off to the side sorting mail. maybe there'd been some kind of coup and the quiet guy had deposed the hook-handed leader of the post office and begun at once to re-organise his domain to his liking.

it was very confusing and it took us a long time to do the bills and rent thing. he ended up getting me to a) withdraw money, which he handed to me, and then b) give almost all of it back to him. it was like a dance or some funny exchange system such as marcel mauss described in 'the gift'. or perhaps the clumsiness of the transaction was a clue that he is an impostor and the true king of the post office is languishing in a cell somewhere, plotting his return.

eventually we were done and i went home. i frolicked about putting words next to one another for a while and putting sounds next to each other and putting letters next to each other. when i got tired of this i went and lay on the couch with alaska and watched cartoons for an hour or so. georgia came in.

'have you seen tigger?' she said. tigger is what we call the puppy. tigger pony, that's his full name, though i call him 'lil puppy pup-pup' most of the time. anyway, i hadn't seen him. we thought about it for a little while.

'did you bring him back from the post office?' she said. i had to admit that i couldn't remember doing that.

'AAAAAAAH! QUICK QUICK LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO!' she said and we ran out to the car. i only had socks on my feet. 'QUICKLY QUICKLY!' they were special socks called tabi. ninjas wear them. 'OMIGOD I HOPE HE'S ALRIGHT!' they have a separate little bit for your big toe to go in. they make sense if you're wearing ninja boots, which are also thus divided, but i wasn't. 'OOOO POOR TIGGER PONY!' it had been raining and my socks got wet.

we drove there. georgia wrung her hands the whole way. we got there and jumped out and he was nowhere to be seen. we ran around looking for people to ask. there was a guy in the post office. he had a beard but he wasn't the guy i'd seen earlier. maybe he was a bearded minion of the new leader or maybe there'd been yet ANOTHER coup while i was moving words around and watching cartoons. i knocked on the door but the post office was shut and it took a while to convince the guy to open the door. turned out the sisters of mercy had come in asking whose dog it was. not that sisters of mercy. the other sisters of mercy.

we went to the sisters of mercy but they were shut. religious orders have business hours now. christ would spin in his grave if He hadn't already bailed from it like a zombie. a car pulled out of the driveway as we stood there. i ran over and tapped on their window. my socks squelched on the asphalt.

turns out they found tigger and asked around and then decided he'd been dumped because no-one knew whose he was and he was so cold. he feels the cold, tigger pony. he's only little and he feels the cold. i tried to not look like a bad person. i explained that when i finally realised what had happened i'd run out of the house without stopping to put shoes on. i lifted up my foot so the sisters of mercy could see my wet ninja socks. i'm not sure if it helped that much, standing on one leg with my wet ninja sock in the air, smiling winningly in a way i hoped no evil puppy-dumping motherfucker could pull off convincingly. the sisters of mercy looked at me doubtfully, that's for damn sure.

anyway: the upshot was that i drove over to the lost dogs' home this morning. it was a little bit of a drive. i got there and answered questions about things. while the nice lady at the desk was typing something in i looked down at tigger's file. under 'euthanasia?' it said 'no'. under 'why?' it said 'owner located'. i was glad about that. i was disturbed that the lil puppy had come so close to the word 'euthanasia?'. he's so little!

we went out the back to get tigger. i walked out amongst cages and cages and cages. on my right was a very big cage indeed, full of blankets. the warm essence of dog moved out in every direction from this pile at the speed of smell. it was like the benevolent sun, emanating its rays in all directions.

we walked past other cages. the dogs in them looked out at me forlornly and i looked back at them. i found tigger and he jumped all over me and licked me again and again while i carried him past the dog-blanket sun and said i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i'm so sorry!

we drove home. he sat on my lap. he's only little so i let him. on the way i saw a police car stopped on the side of the street. as we approached it started moving and drove along beside us for a bit.

is it legal to drive around with a puppy on your lap? i'm not sure but neither the car nor the puppy were registered so i didn't want to find out. i sang a little song.

i am invisible to police, it went. (or uninteresting at the very least).


xxxx

parabolas

this morning i got up. i felt pretty good. maybe i am finally getting enough vitamin b.

i walked down the hall. i looked back at the puppy. he was still curled up on his lil blanket near the front door.

'interesting,' i thought. 'i have more energy than the puppy.'

i looked at the puppy some more. one of his eyes was open. he looked back at me with said eye.

'very interesting indeed,' i thought. 'could it be,' i thought, 'that we are symbiotically linked like homonculi? that maybe we form some kind of closed system where the amount of energy stays constant but passes between us through some mechanism which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye and the details of which would certainly hafta be worked out in somewhat more detail? but that anyway in layperson's terms one of us has the energy at any given time t while the other reposes or struggles to walk without tripping over? and that right now the lil puppy is as montgomery burns would say the cool yin to my raging yang?'

i looked at the puppy again. one of his eyes was still open. there was, gentle reader, a subtle gleam in said eye.

'is it just my imagination,' i thought, 'which is, admittedly, quite active,' i continued thinking, 'or does that lil puppy look just the tiniest bit guilty?'

i stepped over a gentle shiny parabola of puppy piss on the hallway floor. i guess the puppy had pissed against one of the walls sometime earlier and the earth's intelligence had moved it downhill and it had dried, nearly, in a gentle shiny parabola.

i continued down the hallway absorbed, gentle reader, in these reflections. actually to be quite honest i'd moved on from my psycho-physical musings and was absorbed in picking words out to describe what i saw. i'd settled on 'parabola' and was just forming the word 'gentle' with my interior voice and then i said a very very rude word indeed and looked at my heel with the melancholy eye of a poet.

the puppy groweth in cunning, i can say that much. he had artfully left the parabola right outside my door where i'd see it and be distracted and not notice the limpid pool he'd left just next to the bathroom. he'd found one of the natural basins formed by the geological activity in our linoleum and filled it with piss. my heel was sitting in it.

my sock was wet. i took it off. later i would add it to the pile of piss-wet socks in my laundry basket but for now i was interested to see that the pool of puppy piss was a much fainter yellow than usual: the pale yellow of the sun through train windows: the pale yellow of unsalted butter.

'interesting,' i thought. 'maybe the mechanism of it all has something to do with vitamin b.'

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

o my heart which i have from my mother!
o my heart which i have from my being!
do not rise against me as a witness!
do not turn against me in the tribunal!
do not tip the scales against me in front of the keeper of the scales!
- the book of going forth by day

1. i was
I WAS TIRED this morning. maybe i'm not getting enough vitamin b. maybe the puppy is getting it all. i think the puppy is getting enough vitamin b because when i walked into the kitchen this morning he was looking at me and i looked at him and then i saw behind him a small pool of puppy piss, cartoon-sun yellow. it was a hallucinatory yellow in fact and the world's intelligence was moving it downhill. it was becoming a slow stream because our floors are not flat.

i cleaned up the piss. i do this a lot at the moment. i'm also home a lot just now working on music and so is the puppy. home, i mean. the puppy is not working on any music. stop trying to confuse me with your suggestions and, frankly, innuendos. thanks.

when i walk he spins like a satellite around the planet of whichever leg just hit the ground. he twines around my legs like bolas . i hafta be alert lest i fall.


2. later i
LATER I WAS on the train. a woman and a little boy came and sat across from me. the boy's hair was the colour of burning butter. by this i mean that some of it was a pale yellow and some of it was darker.

the boy was excited to sit by the window and gaze out at the world: the world always new and surprising. i'd guess he was four. to be that young is to know you don't have the measure of the world: you want to keep looking at it out the window because it's full of surprises: look! a truck! look! a helicopter! look! a horse!

we didn't actually see a helicopter or a horse. i am just giving an example.

none of the rest of us have the measure of the world either but we forget, maybe, and instead of looking out the window we think about other things but the world is always new. it's always being put together just in time for us to look at it. the woman wasn't looking out the window. she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.

some people can get fucked. no, wait.. that came out wrong.. i meant to say some people think it's funny the way kids have more energy than the adults who look after them.

'isn't it amazing,' they say, 'how much energy kids have! and look how boring their parents are!'

but see, the parents would have more energy if someone else was cooking them food and paying their rent and cleaning up after them and so on. kids are like rock stars. other people attend to their needs and they get to throw tantrums and jump on the furniture and look out the window at the world always new: look! the sun pale behind clouds! the sun paler than my butter hair!

i don't mean to imply that the little boy across from me was some kind of prima donna. i was just making a more general point. he seemed in fact like a total sweetie and he was happy to snuggle up to the woman when he got tired so i guess they knew each other from before the train.

there were things lying around on the banks by the train tracks. everything had an air of magical decay.


3. look! pepper-trees!
WE PASSED BY pepper-trees. look! pepper-trees! something pale and generous was flowering the pines, too.

xxxx

the quote generator; spirulina; venture capital

1. the quote generator
on the way to the miracle of the possum christ i went to an exhibition opening. it was fun! while i was there que and ana said 'see that girl over there? she talks entirely in quotes.'
'wow.' i said. 'i'm gonna go talk to her.'

reader: i confess to bein a lil drunk. also: my pants were a lil loose and kept migrating south. my pubic hair kept waving over the top like a red rag to a bull, bein as how my pubic hair is red and all. i didn't really mind. i was happy to see it again. i felt a surge of familiarity and affection for my red pubic hair, such as you might feel for an old friend who turns up unexpectedly. this isn't really relevant to the action, i'm just setting the scene.

i wandered around for a while til i found her. she was wearing a skeleton costume: a black one-piece with bones painted on it in white.
'hey!' i said. 'i heard you talk entirely in quotes. is it true?'
'sometimes..' she said. '(husbands and wives, 1992)'.

an aside: have you ever noticed how raymond off everybody loves raymond sounds just like oscar the grouch?

back to the conversation: we talked for a while. i hafta say i enjoyed it a great deal. she didn't talk entirely in quotes though, and i told her so: 'you don't talk entirely in quotes!' i was pointing out that she was speaking in quotes AND attributions (you know, the bibliographic part - the bit in brackets) and that the attributions weren't part of the original and were therefore not quotes. she looked pained.
'give me a break!' she said. '(beavis and butthead, 1996).'

wow. i was impressed.
'do you have like multiple sources for this kind of small-talk chit-chat?' i asked.
'yes (yoko ono, 1966)' she said, and then she said 'yes (optus, 2006)'

eventually i asked her her name. i was wondering how she was gonna deal with that one. she said 'http://www.thequotegenerator.com '. now i was thoroughly charmed. i'd never met anyone else who spoke in hypertext before. i decided that if she liked wwf wrestling i'd propose marriage, right then and there. borrow a ring from somewhere. recite the vows with my pubic hair waving gently in the breeze that announced this to be the last night of summer, waving like hungry kelp in the languid waters of the carribbean, reaching out to the air and saying: will you dance with me, you devilish breeze? dance with me instead of snatching away the minutes of summer like the grinch? instead of cooling the ardour of the air with your cool uh.. absence of heat?

unfortunately she'd never given the matter of wwf wrestling much thought. i am still a bachelor, therefore: damn! always a bridgegroom, never a bride. no, wait, that came out wrong. always a best man, never the groom? doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it? hmm. i can tell i will hafta ruminate on this further: pass the cud of marital status through all four stomachs of my mind until it makes sense like simple cellulose.


2. spirulina
friday was my birthday. i didn't organise anything in particular, partly cos of the shortness of february of which i have spoken before, and partly cos i had many other things to organise such as the stuff of my life which is snarled into a snarl. also: partly cos i couldn't be bothered wondering if anyone was going to turn up if i did, a form of paranoia to which i am suspect. nonetheless: i had a grand old time.

eventually i ended up at an exhibition opening, different from the pre-possum-christian one. how did that happen? beats me but i was there so it happened somehow.

barcelona is pronounced bartheLAWna. howabout that. that's cos catalan spanish lisps the letter c. i was thinking about this the other day in the context of lisping. it seems to have vanished a bit, but there used to be a pretty strong association between homosexuality and lisping in the popular imagination. and i wondered if this, and the jibes that used to go with it, were actually xenophobic in origin rather than strictly homophobic: 'we hate youse gay cunts not cos you're gay but cos you talk like FUCKING SPANIARDS' - that kind of thing.

fucking spaniards. where was i? penny: that's right. this short woman with red hair walks in. i remember her name is penny. this is funny, cos i only met her briefly about 15 years ago, and then once a few years later. nevertheless i remember her name. weird. why can't i remember the names of people i see more often and actually interact with from time to time? it'd be just a tad more fucking useful, methinks.

penny wants to move to barcelona. why? because they like her there and they treat her good. she feels beautiful there. fair enough, too. i'd probably do the same if i discovered a place like that. melbourne's pretty good though. i got no complaints except sometimes about the weather. people say nice things about me often enough to keep me happy and here. thanks people. you guys are the best!

my attention kept wandering. this was partly a defense mechanism. penny seemed just a bit too impressed that i'd remembered her name lo these many years, and i was getting the sense she was reading something more into it than the mere freak of neurochemical architecture i reckon it was. (i'm using 'impressed' here in the sense that you'd use it of soap impressed with a cell-key as part of a noble but ultimately doomed escape attempt. that is, it seemed to have made an imprint that wasn't gonna fade in a hurry.)

anyway, she's tried to live in barcelona twice before but couldn't work out how to make money there. now she's studying natural therapies.
'barcelona's like ten years behind australia when it comes to natural healing!' she says. 'all these things i take for granted, they've never even heard of. they've never heard of spirulina!'

note to self: hmm..

spirulina, by the way, is a mexican algae that grows in highly alkaline high-altitude ponds. it's a vegetarian source of vitamin b12 and a whole bunch of other stuff your body likes having around. and true, it is algae, but once it's dried and powdered it tastes better than you'd expect. actually, it doesn't. it tastes just like you'd expect dried algae powder to taste. it fucking tastes like shit, that's what i'm getting at here. the aztecs called it tecuitlatl, meaning 'stone's excrement', so i'm not making this shit up.

question: will barcelona be improved by the importation of dried mexican algae that evokes stone-shit in the tongue of the aztecs? i guess there's only one way to find out.. to the venture capital, without a moment to lose!


3. at the venture capital
ok, does everyone know what venture capital is? just in case:

let's say you've got an idea that will make a shitload of money. actually, an arseload of money. the distinction is important, for reasons which will become clear shortly.

however, in order to put this idea into practice, you'll need to spend a bunch of money. not as much money as you're gonna make, but maybe quite a bit. let's call it a shitload of money, on the principle that a shitload must always logically be less than an arseload.

what you do then is you go to the pile of venture capital you have sitting in the vault, because venture capital is the money you hafta spend to be able to make money somehow. when people say 'you hafta spend money to make money', venture capital is the first kind of money.

unfortunately, you may not have a big pile of money in a vault. maybe that's why you're spending your time dreaming up schemes to ship algae to barcelona instead of, y'know, guzzling gin and juice in the benz with voluptuous, scantily clad members of the sex of your choice.

what you do then is you go find a venture capitalist and explain to them how much money you'll both make if they give you a smaller but maybe quite substantial amount of money first.

all these thoughts are weighing on my mind because i'm staring at where my pile of venture capital used to be and i can't see it anywhere. hello? he-lloooooooo? maybe it's hiding somewhere.. wait a sec..

















..no, it's definitely gone. damn! now i hafta go find someone to lend me a shitload of money on the premise that shipping dried shitful mexican algae to barcelona will make us both an arseload of money.

sheesh. you see the kind of shit i hafta put up with? i may hafta ask you to excuse me for a while because a while is how long i reckon it's all gonna take..

sincerely yours,
mike
xxxx